THE young men who listened so intently to Admiral Onishi in the conference room on the second floor of the Mabalacat headquarters were not surprised by what he had to say. For months the question of taiatari (ramming) tactics had been under discussion within the combat units of the air forces. Some pilots favored it as the best method of destroying the enemy. Others detested the idea as an inhumane waste of life. The proponents argued that the chances of coming back from a mission were so slim that they might as well make the ultimate effort. Especially since Admiral Arima’s spectacular suicide dive against the Franklin , suicide attacks had been on everyone’s mind.
What was new was the admiral’s exposition, which showed how
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far he had committed himself to the suicide attack, and how much study he had put into technique. Later, Admiral Onishi’s adherents and sycophants would claim that the admiral had no general policy in mind; that he was driven by the exigencies of the Philippine situation and the needs of the Sho operation. But the facts indicate otherwise, from the admiral’s advocacy of the suicide attack during and after the battles for the Marianas.
What the admiral was asking was that these six men commit themselves and thus establish a policy that would control the lives of every pilot in the air group. Did they have the right to bargain away other men’s lives?
Captain Yamamoto had given Commander Tamai full authority in his absence, but Tamai was not willing to go so far. He could not make so far-reaching a decision, he told the admiral. They would have to wait for Captain Yamamoto’s return.
Admiral Onishi was in no mood to wait. Captain Yamamoto had told him on the telephone that Commander Tamai’s decisions were to be final. The decision had to be made this night. Tamai would have to take the responsibility.
Commander Tamai asked for a few minutes to consider the problem. He had now been pushed to the wall. If he agreed, he was sending his men to certain death, something no air leader had done before. It was not hard to imagine the far-reaching implications of his decision. But if he said no. . .
Commander Tamai left the room and went into the room next door. He asked Lieutenant Ibusuki to come in. What he needed to know was the attitude to be expected of the officer pilots and noncommissioned officer pilots toward such a plan. It could be extremely embarrassing if they balked.
Lieutenant Ibusuki assured Tamai that the pilots would welcome the change. Thus reassured he returned to the conference room. He told the admiral the 201st was prepared to go ahead with the suicide program, and asked that the men themselves be allowed to form their own organization. Onishi was only too glad to agree. He had just weathered one of the most difficult moments of his
life. He then went into the room prepared for him and lay down on a cot to rest.
There was no sleep that night for Commander Tamai. He had organizational work to do.
In that sense, Commander Tamai was every bit as equal to the responsibility as Captain Yamamoto would have been. In fact, Tamai had been an air-group commander himself until recently. He had led the 263rd Air Group for many months, beginning with training days. The unit had been one of the first regular naval air academy units to see its training foreshortened in the early months of 1944. By May the unit had been sent to fight in the Biak operation. Tamai took twenty-eight planes to the Peleliu base and another thirty planes were moved down to Guam. On June 11 the unit lost four planes in a pitched battle with American carrier fighters. From June 15 to June 18 the entire air group was engaged in the defense of the Marianas as a part of Admiral Kakuji Kakuta’s First Air Fleet. As such they were ordered to participate in his and Admiral Ozawa’s plan to shuttle fighters from the Japanese Combined Fleet carriers to the Marianas airfields, hitting the Americans from both sides. The plan was a disaster, resulting in what the Americans had called the Marianas Turkey Shoot, and the proof of its failure lay in the fact that virtually every plane of the 263rd Air Group was lost.
Following the battle for Saipan, ten planes were found for the 263rd and were moved to Guam. More planes were shuttled from Palau and from the homeland. On July 8, a six-plane unit headed for Peleliu to carry out a surprise attack on the American carriers. Fi ve of the six planes were lost, including that of Lieutenant Ya- suhiru Shigematsu, one of Japan’s aces, who was posthumously promoted two full grades to lieutenant commander as a symbol of the Emperor’s gratitude for his heroic death.
After that attack the airmen of the 263rd were engaged in a flowing air battle that whittled away at their strength until on July 10 there were no planes left. That day the 263rd Air Group was demobilized, but that did not get the Japanese fliers and aircrews
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off Guam, where they were stranded by the American attack on the Marianas. They were deemed important enough in the Japanese war scheme to be taken off by submarine and moved to Peleliu and Palau. There the remaining members of the 263rd Air Group were amalgamated into the ranks of the 201st Air Group.
There was no command for Commander Tamai, who had to step down to become executive officer to Captain Yamamoto. He and the others had fought with the airmen of the original 201st group until now and the losses had continued. Their story told in capsule what had happened to the Japanese naval air force in the past few months.
ALTHOUGH Commander Tamai had agreed with Admiral Onishi in principle on the suicide attacks, the commander had a ticklish problem to solve. He could scarcely post an order on the bulletin board, even if his emotions were not deeply involved with these young men, most of them the remnant of the group he had taken into battle six months earlier.
He called his squadron leaders together, and they agreed that the only method of procedure was to call the enlisted pilots, who were the vast majority, and put the matter squarely to them.
Tamai recounted to them the story Admiral Onishi had told him, and then he posed the question. Admiral Onishi had proposed the establishment of a special attack unit, with its members dedicated to suicide dives against the enemy ships. How did they feel about it?
He had a good idea as to their reaction. The 201st Air Group were suffering from combat fatigue and had been fighting constantly since February. Their losses had been staggering; nearly every pilot had been shot down or at least shot up. Virtually none of them expected to survive the war. They were living on nerves, and they were ready for anything. What Admiral Onishi proposed appealed to the strong sense of self-sacrifice and mystical zeal of the Japanese, a heritage from a long and bloody history.
Commander Tamai, like Admiral Onishi, had called on the powerful strain of patriotism that beat in most Japanese servicemen’s breasts. From childhood these young men had been steeped in the legends of bushido, the warrior code that said they must gladly sacrifice their lives for Emperor and country.
The response was what Admiral Onishi must have expected all along. Every pilot volunteered.
That assembly had lasted until past midnight. After it had ended, and he had sent the enlisted men back to their quarters, sworn to secrecy, he returned to the orderly room. He now had his sacrificial lambs. But who was to lead them? He needed an officer, specifically an officer who represented the professional Japanese navy. It would never do to have the public believe that the navy was sacrificing the “hostilities only” men.
Who was that leader to be?
Commander Tamai selected Lieutenant Naoshi Kanno of the 306th Fighter Squadron, one of the most spectacular figures in the 201st Air Group. Kanno had already made one suicide mission and had lived to tell the tale. In the summer, when he had been based at Yap with other members of the 201st, they had fought time after time with allied B-24s, heavy bombers that bristled with guns and were hard to shoot down. Kanno had shot down a number of them, plus several American fighters, and was one of the leading “aces” of the 201st Air Group.
His greatest accomplishment to date was to take on a B-24 bomber in midair after his guns failed and to ram the aircraft.
The usual technique of a desperate Japanese fighter pilot was to approach head on, which was almost always fatal to the fighter and its pilot. Kanno improved on that technique; he made a head- on approach, and then sheered away so close to the plane that he was able to cut up one of the B-24’s vertical stabilizers with the propeller of his Zero. On impact, Kanno blacked out. When he came to he found the Zero still flying, but in a tight spin. When he dived and recovered, he saw the B-24 crash into the sea. Then he managed to get the damaged Zero back to Yap.
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With the 201st Air Group arrival in the Philippines, Lieutenant Kanno continued as one of the stalwart fighters, and in the skipbombing training proved himself the most skillful of them. So Kanno had the skill.
He also had the temperament for the job. He was a devil-may- care pilot, who had come into the war believing in a short but happy life. Nothing that had happened to him since had shaken that belief. He had no thought that he might survive the war, and he showed that attitude to the world by his manner of treating his belongings. Other pilots marked their kit bags with their name, rank and unit. Expecting the same treatment at some point that other “aces” received after their deaths in battle, Kanno inscribed his kit bag “the late Lieutenant Commander Naoshi Kanno,” a bit of humor which everyone around him understood perfectly. The only problem was that Kanno was not at Mabalacat but somewhere in Japan.
The navy high command had suffered in bringing planes down from Japan, since the tyro pilots knew so little about their craft. They kept getting lost at sea, or running afoul of enemy planes and getting shot down. After the debilitating American carrier raids of September, when Tokyo announced that new fighters were available in Japan, Admiral Teraoka had sent a number of highly experienced pilots home to pick up the planes and bring them back to the Philippines.
Most of the young men jumped at the chance, but not Kanno. He went off gloomily predicting that something important was going to happen in his absence. Now something important had indeed happened, and there was no time to wait for the leading contender to return to take the post of leader.
After some soul-searching, Commander Tamai settled upon Lieutenant Yukio Seki, a recent transfer from Admiral Shigeru Fukudome’s Second Air Fleet on Taiwan. Although Seki was not a trained fighter pilot but a carrier-bomber pilot, he was known favorably both to Commander Tamai and to Commander Inoguchi, who had taught at the naval academy when Seki was a midshipman.
As a professional, Lieutenant Seki would fill the bill nicely, if he agreed to take the short-lived post. In the minds of the two senior officers there was some question about that; Seki had only recently married and he had much to live for.
Again an orderly was sent, and the sleeping Seki was aroused. He came stumbling down to the orderly room, still buttoning his tunic.
Tamai wasted no words. He motioned Seki to a chair and gave it to him cold: Admiral Onishi had come with a plan to crash bomb- loaded Zeros into the decks of carriers. The pilots were ready. What was needed was a leader, and Seki was under consideration for the post. What did he have to say?
For a few moments the lieutenant did not answer. Tamai knew that he was eager to fly in combat; for weeks Seki had been pestering him to go on a fighter mission. But what the commander now proposed was something so far more demanding, so sacrificial, so final, that Tamai’s cheeks were smeared with tears as he finished his short speech.
What was Lieutenant Seki to say? He was a career officer. If he refused, what was his future? Perhaps Lieutenant Seki’s patriotism was strong enough to conceal any negative thought. Seki’s response was everything that even the admiral could have wished for. He sat, he thought and then he announced that Tamai must let him have the job.
Tamai could relax. The unpleasant designation of those who would be the first to die had been accomplished in a few hours. Now all that was left was to sort out the details.
The new unit must have a name, something to conjure with. Commander Inoguchi suggested Shimpu, whose two Chinese characters mean God and Wind. Together they were usually pronounced Kamikaze, which to the Japanese meant Divine Wind and referred specifically to the typhoon of 1281, which drove the Mongols from Japan’s shores.
But the characters could also be given the Chinese pronunciation of Shimpu, which, to put the matter colloquially in American per-
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spective, had “a lot of class.” All Japanese would understand precisely what was meant by Shimpu, just as they were soon to learn that Tokotai, “Special Attack Unit,” was a euphemism for suicide squad.
Once these momentous decisions were made and the new unit had a revealing yet mystical name, Commander Inoguchi went to Admiral Onishi’s room and wakened the commander to give him the word.
Onishi did little more than nod. He must have been exhausted by the pressures of the day. He rose from his cot, dictated a statement authorizing the creation of the suicide corps, and then was driven back to Manila.
THAT night Lieutenant Seki sat down and wrote two letters. One was to his wife, explaining why she would never see him again. The other was to his parents:
My dear father and my dear mother:
He began by discussing a letter recently received from home.
Concerning Nishiji’s mother’s difficulties...! hope you can help. . .
Then he got to the crux:
At this time the nation stands at the crossroads of defeat; the problem can only be resolved by each individual’s repayment of the Imperial Benevolence.
In this the man who has cherished a military career has no choice.
Kamakura’s parents [his wife’s mother and father] whom I hold so earnestly dear to the bottom of my heart—I cannot bring myself to write them this shocking news—please confide in them.
Because Japan is an Imperial Domain, I shall carry out a
ramming attack against a carrier to repay the Imperial Benevolence. I am resigned to this.
To all of you, obedient to the end. . .
If this note seemed overly abrupt, and the one to his soon to be widowed wife not much less so, then what was a patriotic young officer to say? His admiral had asked that he kill himself to save the Empire. In what Lieutenant Seki did not say lay the pungency of silence. . .
BY morning the new suicide unit was all but ready for its mission. Commander Tamai and Lieutenant Seki stayed up most of the rest of the night, planning missions. Inoguchi, the staff officer, prepared a notice summarizing the fruits of their deliberations. The Shimpu unit would consist of twenty-six fighter planes and the pilots to man them.
Commander Inoguchi, a student of literature, had recalled a patriotic poem by the poet Motoori Norinaga, one verse of which had stuck in his mind:
Shikishima no Yamato Gokoro o hito towaba Asahi ni niu Ya~ mazakura hana. [The heart of the soul of Japan to a man is the fragrance of the wild cherry blossom in the rising sun.]
The symbolism encapsulated the deep reverence these fliers felt for their country, all the fliers agreed.
The Shimpu unit was divided into four flights: Yamato, which was an historic name for Japan; Asahi, the name of the rising sun which Japan had made the symbol of her existence; Yamazakura, the name of the mountain cherry blossoms so dear to Japanese hearts; and Shikishima, another poetic, historic name for old Japan.
At some time during the night the officers had addressed themselves to the unpleasant reality of what they proposed. Half of the pilots, said the announcement, would be assigned to crash their aircraft into the enemy ships. The other half would escort the suicide planes, observe, then return to base to report on the attacks.
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The new weapon had been designed to create maximum trouble for the Americans with minimal resources. Now it was forged.
ADMIRAL Onishi bore a tremendous load of responsibility and to justify his espousal of suicide he called on the mystical. He was well known for his calligraphy, an art form in Japan and China, and often his friends and admirers asked him for a sample.
After the formation of the suicide corps, he appeared at headquarters one day with a scroll, which he presented to the staff:
Kyo sakite, asu chiru
Blossoming today, tomorrow scattered;
Hana no wagami ka na
Life is like a delicate flower;
Ikade sono ka wo kiyoku todomen
Could one expect the fragrance to last forever?
Onishi, Kamikaze Tokkotai Ei
Onishi, Divine Wind Special Attack Force Member.
The signature meant that the admiral considered that he, too, was a member of the Kamikaze corps, not only its originator.
CHAPTER SIX